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Kevin Durant, the star of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is the youngest scoring champion in N.B.A. history. At 24, he has led the league in scoring for three consecutive seasons, and all signs point to him keeping that up for the foreseeable future. It follows, then, that Durant should also be a prodigy of a head case. He should have been arrested for reckless driving at around age 9, broken his hand in a strip-club brawl at age 12 and accidentally shot his chauffeur no later than age 15.
Instead, Durant has a reputation roughly on par with Gandhi. He seems to be — not just for a scoring champion, but for anyone — almost inhumanly humble. His motto, which he intones constantly, is "Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard." His pregame ritual involves kissing his mother, as does his postgame ritual. Once, in college, during probably the greatest freshman season of all time, a reporter asked Durant if he realized that he had just single-handedly outscored the entire opposing team in the second half of a game. Durant answered, with absolute sincerity, "Who, me?" When I asked the Thunder coach, Scott Brooks, to tell me about his superstar, he laughed. "Whatever you say nice, you can print it out and I'll just say I said it," he said. "Because it's true."
Durant could be forgiven for wanting to brag a little. He is currently the second-best basketball player in the world — a category in which he trails only LeBron James, who is four years older, and whose Miami Heat beat the Thunder last year in the finals. The budding rivalry between KD and LBJ (off the court they're friends, Olympic teammates and sometimes, controversially, workout partners) is the kind of thing the N.B.A. has been fantasizing about for decades, a yin and yang as tightly balanced as any since Magic and Bird.
LeBron and Durant are, conveniently for storytelling purposes, opposites. LeBron looks like something out of a Marvel comic: a sentient pile of muscles. Durant looks like something from a Pixar movie — a humanoid praying mantis. He is 6 feet 9 inches tall and almost disturbingly skinny, with disproportionately long arms. Sportswriters, struggling to describe him, have compared him to capellini and a pterodactyl. His body looks almost like an engineering mistake, and early in his career it seemed as if it might actually be one: before the 2007 draft, there was a minor kerfuffle when it was discovered that Durant couldn't bench-press 185 pounds, the standard predraft litmus test, even a single time. (The next pick in the draft, Al Horford, lifted it 20 times.) LeBron entered the league as a teenager and promptly knocked around all of the grown men who tried to guard him. As a 19-year-old rookie, Durant drifted around, shooting jumpers and trying to avoid contact, and still spent much of his time picking himself up off the floor. Although he won Rookie of the Year, he wasn't particularly efficient in doing so, and his team was horrible.
Despite their discrepancy in visible muscle tone, Durant has strengths that LeBron will probably never have. LeBron's jump shot, for instance, is funky-looking, jerky, angular and streaky. Durant's is natural, pure, quick and stunningly accurate — somehow, his ridiculous arms manage not to get in the way but to amplify his power, so it looks as if he's shooting with zero effort even from 30 feet away.
Durant's real advantage over LeBron, however, is civic. LeBron infamously held a prime-time TV special in the summer of 2010 to announce that he was abandoning Cleveland for the glamour of Miami — a P.R. debacle known as the Decision. When he arrived in Miami, he took part in a histrionic rally at which he promised, on a stage surrounded by a W.W.E. -style light show and smoke machines, that his new team was so good it was going to dominate the rest of the league without even trying.
It's impossible to imagine that kind of behavior from Durant. In the middle of the overheated summer of 2010, the day before LeBron's Decision, Durant announced quietly, on Twitter, that he had just signed a contract to stay in Oklahoma — the third-smallest market in the league, a place devoid of beaches and celebrities and night life — for another five years. You got the feeling he would have committed to the Thunder for the rest of his life if only the Players' Union would have allowed it.
Durant, in other words, seems to have been invented in a laboratory beneath the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce to serve as the international face of Oklahoma — a state known for its citizens' kindness, levelheadedness, work ethic, community spirit and, above all, humility. (The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop bragging about anything.) Led by Durant, the Thunder has become one of the N.B.A.'s best and youngest and most popular teams, an international icon of brotherhood and good will that has helped to usher in golden ages in both Oklahoma City and the N.B.A., an electric blue Trojan horse inside of which Oklahoma has managed to smuggle its ethos to the rest of the world: good folksy folks humbly helping other folksy folks stay humble and helpful.
Oklahoma sits right in the middle of the country: it's not the cultured East or the wild West or the frigid North or the humid South but exactly where all those things meet. The mountains touch the prairies, which touch the plains. This has created, over the millenniums, crazy animals and crazy weather and crazy 25-car pileups of culture. In 1889, the almost unbelievable land run sent tens of thousands of ragtag settlers from all over the country literally racing to claim tracts of practically uninhabitable land. Oklahoma, in other words, is the Hadron supercollider of states: it slams disparate things together, over and over, producing endless crises of cohesion. Even tornadoes, the region's defining devil winds, are a result of a meteorological collision: a convergence of three different weather systems that happens with freakish regularity in Oklahoma and its immediate environs. Meteorologists in Oklahoma are basically rock stars.
Professional athletes, on the other hand, have rarely had much of a presence here. That began to change in 2006, when a consortium of wealthy Oklahomans, led by the financier Clay Bennett, bought the Seattle SuperSonics — a once-proud franchise that had been stuck for years in the drain-swirl of mediocrity. Most people assumed, cynically, that Bennett was buying the team in order to move it, as quickly as possible, to Oklahoma City, his hometown. He had pledged to make a good-faith effort to keep the team in Seattle — an effort that came into suspicion shortly after the sale, when the new owner demanded that Seattle come up with nearly $300 million to build a new arena. Seattle refused, at which point the ownership group announced, regretfully, that it was going to have to move the Sonics to a city with a suitable arena — a city that also happened to be Oklahoma City. The fallout was intense: lawsuits, protests, scandal. Even Oklahomans who love the team admit that they were uncomfortable with the way it was acquired. The sportswriter Bill Simmons, in solidarity with the people of Seattle, referred to the Thunder exclusively in his columns as the Zombie Sonics.
One of the miracles of the modern Thunder — and there are several — is how quickly they've made people forget the stain of their origin. The re-branding of the franchise has been quick and efficient: the team is now widely perceived as principled, well run and — above all — thoroughly Oklahoman. ESPN recently named it the No. 1 sports franchise in America. This fall, it seemed like a step toward closure when the Seattle City Council approved a plan to build a new basketball arena there. Simmons announced, just a few weeks ago, that he was officially retiring the phrase Zombie Sonics. In almost no time at all, the Oklahoma City Thunder had achieved escape velocity.
Much of the credit for this turnaround goes to Sam Presti, the Thunder's general manager. Presti took over the team the year before they left Seattle. He was 29, the youngest G.M. in league history. His first move was to draft Kevin Durant, which anyone would have done. His second, less obvious decision was to strip the roster of all the veterans and big contracts that would have prevented him from rebuilding from scratch. When the team moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City, Presti found himself in charge of not only the worst team in the league but also one of the worst in the history of professional basketball. The Oklahoma City Thunder won 3 games out of their first 32. This record, 3-29, is now a kind of touchstone in the organization — almost everyone I talked to invoked it at some point, and many of them even exaggerated it to 3-30.
Most G.M.'s would have panicked, but that isn't Presti's way: he moved patiently, methodically. He overhauled not only the roster of the team but also the culture of the organization. This involved rethinking everything, no matter how small, from meeting times to media policy to the decorations on the practice-facility walls. Everyone soon became familiar with the Presti buzzwords: process, system, patience, sustainability. He made a habit of promoting people within the organization so that, from top to bottom, the Thunder became very young and tightly knit. He stressed community outreach to an unusual degree. He devoted extra resources to the development of the young Thunder players and, on the marketing side, refused to call attention to any single player apart from his teammates, even Durant, who was quickly becoming an international superstar. Meanwhile, Presti used high draft picks to surround Durant with other promising young players — Russell Westbrook, Serge Ibaka, James Harden — all of whom overachieved, relative to the rest of their draft classes, to an almost amazing degree.
The Presti rebuild, a meticulously rational plan, now looks a lot like a fairy tale. The Thunder has improved, year by year, exactly on schedule: they made the playoffs in their second season, the Western Conference finals in their third and the Finals last year. If the Thunder doesn't win the title this year, it will seem almost unfair — a violation of the basic laws of narrative. Among basketball fans, Presti has become a mythic braniac legend, the managerial equivalent of Kevin Durant: young, focused, dominant and improbably humble.
I met Presti two weeks before the start of training camp at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a site that commemorates, powerfully, the city's defining tragedy: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Presti shook my hand in the lobby, quickly and firmly, and then proceeded to say nothing for many minutes. The museum's director was giving us a tour, and Presti seemed relieved to cede the floor completely to her. He wore a polo shirt, casual pants, fashionable glasses and hip sneakers. He was very slim — no excess — and was fidgeting a lot, bouncing rhythmically at the knees.
We were at the memorial because, as Presti told me later, "This place is part of our existence." Presti sits on the memorial's board, and he makes sure that every player who joins the Thunder visits the site before he ever plays a game. The idea is to teach them the character of the citizenry they've just joined, to help them recognize, as Tom Brokaw put it on the night of the bombing, Oklahomans' "essential sense of goodness, community and compassion."
After our tour, Presti and I talked for a while outside. He struck me as one of the most cautious people I've ever met, constantly stopping and rephrasing, weighing and reweighing his words, openly worried that I was going to misinterpret the team's relationship to the memorial as a P.R. grab, or that I was going to focus my article on him at the expense of others. He ascribed most of the Thunder's success to either luck or his colleagues. The most revealing thing Presti said to me that day had to do with the grounds of the memorial, which were impressively tidy. Despite a suffocatingly hot run of late-summer days, the grass was thick and lush and perfectly mowed, with perfect circles around the perfect trees. Presti pointed out how much work it takes to keep everything looking like that, how much deliberate organization, but also how important it is.
At the Thunder's training center, after a practice in early October, Kevin Durant and I sat on folding chairs at the edge of the gym. He was wearing a black tank top, black shorts and ridiculously colorful shoes. (Loud footwear is one of his few obvious vices.) Practice that day, according to everyone involved, had been "chippy" — Durant's team had lost a couple of early scrimmages to a team full of rookies and backups, and this had sent everyone, especially Durant and Westbrook, into competitive overdrive.
Sitting with Durant a few minutes later, though, I could detect none of that aggressive energy. He was placid, polite, obliging. He said pretty much everything you would expect him to say, in exactly the way you would expect him to say it. He took every opportunity to gush about his teammates, singling out Westbrook and Harden — the team's two other big scorers — as "killers" and insisting that, despite the media's constant attempts to create controversy among them, there was no tension on the team about sharing the ball. It would be ridiculous, he said, to "put those guys on a leash just so I can get two or three more shots up a game." He praised his teammates' unselfishness and said he had learned to play the same way. He said that, although he'd known almost nothing about Oklahoma City before the team moved there, now he couldn't imagine playing anywhere else.
I told Durant that, all over town, people were giving me spontaneous speeches about what a nice guy he was. His response was, naturally, impeccably nice. "I'm just being me, man," he said. "I'm just enjoying this all. I can't complain. I mean, I wasn't raised to be a jerk to anybody. You know what I mean? My mama wouldn't like that, so that's just all I know. Just being nice to people and enjoying what I do."
But how is it possible, I asked, to be as competitive as he must be while also being so nice? Don't those impulses conflict?
He answered with a story.
Growing up, Durant told me, he was a sore loser. That all changed one day when he was 11, after he got destroyed by his father in a game of one on one in the driveway. "Of course I knew I was gonna lose," he said. "He was so much bigger and stronger than me. He was backing me down, dunking, pushing me. He was screaming, talking trash. I scored like one point." Little Kevin was so upset by the loss (and, presumably, by the bullying) that he burst into tears, ran into the house, locked the door and refused to let his father in. The intensity of his own crying surprised him and, after a while, inspired some self-reflection. "I sat back and thought about it and was like, What am I so mad at?" Durant told me, and in that moment, he said, he made a decision. "It's good to be passionate, it's good to hate losing — but I've got to channel it the right way," he said. "You know what I mean? And after a while I just started to learn to leave it where it's at, get rid of it. Once you're done and you're off the court or out of the venue or whatever, go back to being you."
Durant's story touched on something I've thought about often while watching him play. If there's been one consistent criticism of him, it's that he's not aggressive enough — that he fails to use his unearthly skills, as Jordan or Charles Barkley or Kobe would have done, to destroy everybody in his path. There are times, during games, when he seems almost removed from the action, simultaneously there and not there. I always figured that this detachment was just a byproduct of his smoothness: it looks so easy for him, when he strokes four consecutive 3-pointers or tosses in a little half-hook over two defenders, that it's tempting to imagine he's thinking about other things the whole time — that the real Kevin Durant is watching from a little viewing platform deep inside his own head, reading a magazine and clipping his nails, ready to re-engage fully when things get intense. But now I suspect that that uncanny stillness, that sense of remove, is the outward manifestation of Durant's internal control, a sign of his fluency in moving between worlds: aggressive and relaxed, nasty and nice.
Occasionally you can see Durant moving between those worlds, and the transition is jarring. There are moments, for instance, when he dunks and in his excitement begins to stare down his opponent, showboat-style, and you think, No, no, no, no, Kevin Durant, so much of my worldview depends on you not being the type of person who stares people down after dunks. And then, inevitably, a second or so later, he seems to catch himself and jogs back down the court to give all the credit to his teammates. You can see the impulse and the correction — the (to get Freudian for a second) ego and the superego.
This turns out to be a useful way to think about the Thunder. In "Civilization and Its Discontents," Freud argues that humans are ruled by two warring impulses: love, which seeks to bind people into larger and larger groups, and aggression, which seeks to tear them apart. For civilization to work, on even the most basic level, each of us has to find an acceptable outlet for that antisocial aggression. Back in the driveway, Durant's father directed his aggression toward him. Freud argues that most of us, however, learn to turn our aggression inward, where it morphs into what he calls the superego — the policeman of the psyche, watching us constantly to ensure (with its billy club of guilt) that we make choices for the benefit of the group, not just for our own egos. That psychic self-surveillance, Freud says, is one of the big prices we pay for civilization — a kind of voluntary tax we levy against ourselves for the privilege of living with others.
Kevin Durant oozes superego. Even as we talked on our folding chairs after practice, I sensed a duality. He was simultaneously genuine and polished, open and guarded. This seems to be an inevitable consequence of living the life of a superstar, especially in a place like Oklahoma City. Last summer there was public outrage, in some quarters, when it was discovered that Durant's torso — the skin under his jersey, which by design is publicly hidden — is covered with tattoos.
One evening I went to the mall to observe one of Durant's public events. He was at a GameStop, signing copies of a new video game that featured him on its cover. I arrived to find the OKC equivalent of Beatlemania: a line of people, decked out in Thunder gear, stretching out the door and wrapping around the neighboring stores. As I approached the scene, a policeman was dragging a young man who apparently tried to get too close down an escalator. Just then a huge cheer broke out from the crowd. Durant had arrived, through a back entrance, along with a small entourage. I squeezed past the line, stood at the side of the room and watched him throughout the session. He was wearing his signature "KD" gear: hat, T-shirt, sweats. He seemed friendly but also not totally present. Between signatures and photos, he would occasionally grab his phone and sneak a text message under the table. He bantered, here and there, with a couple of kids, but mostly he was quiet and dutiful. His smile seemed automatic. I got the sense that Kevin Durant, the actual 24-year-old guy with the secret tattoos, was hardly even there that night: he was just an avatar for his own fame — this abstract thing that doesn't actually exist but is millions of times bigger than he is. Not that that was his fault, of course. Even if Durant wanted to genuinely connect with people that night, the sheer scale made it impossible. There was too much inflow for a single person's outflow. I got a sense of how insane it must be to live that kind of life, in which things are like that every day, everywhere. Is it even possible to be a good, thoughtful, civic-minded person under that kind of pressure? Suddenly all of those sociopathic scoring champions made sense to me. Radical detachment seemed, in a strange and sad way, almost like the proper response.
Toward the end of our post-practice conversation, Durant leaned over and started unlacing his shoes. I took this as a signal that he was ready to leave. He was tired, no doubt, and had other things to do. I wrapped up our interview and thanked him for his time. He popped immediately out of his seat and walked away. After a few steps, he seemed to catch himself. He turned around, walked back and shook my hand. "Nice to meet you," he said.
The full name of Oklahoma City is the City of Oklahoma City. The police chief of the City of Oklahoma City is named — I'm not joking — Bill Citty. ("Citty" is pronounced exactly like "city.") Chief Citty, hearing that I was in town to write about his city, offered to give me a tour. He drove me around in his sedan, neighborhood by neighborhood, casually ignoring traffic laws, occasionally being honked at, for more than three hours. The last hour or so we spent at the Oklahoma State Fair, where he drove me around in a golf cart.
Chief Citty's tour was my introduction to the civic paradox that is modern OKC: a city that, over the last 15 years, has managed to reinvent itself while other cities have melted down, a conservative town that happily submitted to a series of voluntary taxes, a place where the oxymoron "corporate citizen" almost begins to make some kind of sense.
Citty grew up in Oklahoma City, so he has seen, firsthand, the major phases of the last 60 years. He was born during the postwar boom, in 1953, when everything was awash in federal money. (It is one of the many paradoxes of Oklahoma that, despite all its rhetoric of rugged individualism and free markets, the economy has been heavily depending on the federal government for decades.) Citty's mother worked for a gas company downtown, in an office in the First National Center, one of the defining masterpieces of the city's skyline — a 33-story Art Deco tower with elaborate aluminum decorations based on King Tut's tomb. As a teenager in the 1960s, Citty watched as the new malls and highways started sucking all of downtown's energy out into the suburbs, leaving behind the usual inner-city decay. In the 1970s, after some years of hippyish drifting, he decided to cut his hair, shave off his beard and join the City of Oklahoma City Police Department.
It was 1977. Citty was assigned to patrol a downtown neighborhood called the Deep Deuce, an African-American community that had once been home to world-famous jazz clubs but had declined, by then, into a hub for drugs and gambling and prostitution. (Just before Citty joined the force, a serial killer dumped the body of a prostitute in the basement of a nearby church.) From his beat downtown, Citty watched the city's economy boom with oil money. New houses sprouted everywhere. Then, in 1982, he watched it all go bust: banks, farms, oil — everything. People lost their new homes; thriving businesses closed. "What happened to us in the early '80s," Citty told me, "is what happened to the U.S. economy in '08."
Things were still bad in 1993, when the mayor of Oklahoma City, Ron Norick, persuaded his constituents to do something improbable: to voluntarily tax themselves in order to rebuild the city. The program was called Metro Area Projects, or Maps — a one-cent sales tax that raised more than $350 million. Over the next two decades, Maps and its sequels (the city is currently on Maps 3) would change almost every neighborhood in the city, especially downtown. It built a canal and a minor-league baseball stadium and a new library; it turned an endless stretch of empty warehouses into a vital shopping district; it overhauled the schools; it put water back in the river, which had been so dry that, for decades, the city had to mow it. And of course Maps built a basketball stadium, which would come spectacularly into play many years later.
In 1995, just as Maps was getting rolling, life in the city suddenly came to a stop. On an otherwise ordinary April morning, a 26-year-old terrorist drove a moving truck full of fertilizer and other chemicals into the heart of downtown and parked in front of the nine-story Federal Building. The explosion, at 9:02 a.m., killed 168 people and injured 684. Five blocks west, at Police Headquarters, the tile shook so hard and so many windows broke that Bill Citty assumed the bomb had gone off inside. He figured out its real source only when he saw that the paper raining down everywhere had come from offices inside the Federal Building. He made it there within 20 minutes and stayed for the next month. At that point, Citty was the department's public information officer, which meant he had to wrangle the media, a suddenly gargantuan task. He became, in a sense, the link between Oklahoma City and the rest of the world.
As part of our tour, Citty drove me down to the Deep Deuce, which was now full of bright new brick apartment complexes. He drove me past the State Capitol, the only one in the nation with an oil rig in front of it. He drove me through Automobile Alley, a revitalized hipster pocket. He pointed out the public bike-rental program, Spokies, that opened over the summer. Half of the city seemed to be under construction. Near the basketball arena, an old elevated highway was being torn down: it was now just a lattice of concrete, with on- and offramps that ended in midair. The highway will soon be replaced by a grand boulevard — the Champs-Élysées of OKC — leading right to the Thunder's home.
This public rebuilding helped bring in private investment, which in turn brought in more revenue for public works, which brought in more private investment — and these cycles eventually combined to make Oklahoma City a plausible home for N.B.A. basketball. When it arrived, the growth and the basketball amplified each other. "We'd have a lot of good things happening now even if we didn't get the Thunder," Citty told me. "But we got the Thunder because good things were going on, and now even better things are going on." As an example, he drove me past the Devon Energy Center, the city's new skyscraper, a 50-story steel-and-glass tube that dwarfs every other building in sight.
This, then, is part of the city's love affair with the Thunder. It's more than just a basketball team: it's the culmination of 20 years of civic reinvention, and the promise of more to come. Over the last five years, the city and its team have undergone a perfect mind meld, so at this point it's impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. After all of that sacrifice — the grind of municipal meetings and penny taxes and planning boards, the dust and noise and uncertainty of construction, the horror of 1995 — the little city in the middle of No Man's Land has finally arrived on the world stage. While it's there, it fully intends to put on a good performance.
A basketball team is a kind of miniature society, and the Thunder's is a strange one. Most great N.B.A. teams are built on a rational distribution of talents: two or three elite players whose skills complement, rather than overlap with, one another's, supported by a small army of role players. The classic example is the 1986 Celtics, in which Larry Bird's all-around game and outside shooting were supplemented perfectly by the under-the-basket play of Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. The Thunder, however, were built around three big stars — Durant, Westbrook and Harden — who all have essentially the same talent. Each one is an elite perimeter scorer, and each one needs the ball to be effective. Each could easily be the focus of an offense all by himself. (Harden, who was recently traded after a contract dispute, will now put this theory to the test with the Houston Rockets.) As a result, when the Thunder offense is good, it's organized chaos — an embarrassment of riches. When it's bad, which it is less and less frequently, it's just chaos: stagnation, wild shots, wasted possessions.
Scott Brooks, the Thunder's head coach, told me that he fell in love with basketball in seventh grade, in a small town in Northern California, at a free clinic taught by a local coach. What he loved, immediately, was exactly the problem of this Thunder lineup: the way the game forced you to braid together individual achievement and teamwork, the singular and the collective. Brooks loved that he could go to the gym and work on his game, all by himself, whenever he felt like it, and then, the next day or week, see that work play out in the context of a team. Brooks's mastery of the individual-collective balance allowed him to become a star in high school and college and then — against all the athletic odds, as a 5-foot-11 nonleaper — to patch together a 10-year N.B.A career playing with seven different teams, including the 1994 champion Houston Rockets. Although Brooks had been a scorer in college, as a pro he accepted the job of the old-school N.B.A. point guard: to get the ball to his various teams' stars — Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon — and then get out of the way.
This made Brooks the opposite of the Thunder's point guard, Russell Westbrook. Westbrook is often referred to as the most explosive athlete in the league — his physique is so cartoonishly chiseled that one of his teammates recently compared him to a He-Man doll — and he uses those superpowers to do things Brooks never could have dreamed of: to turn a defensive rebound, in just a few reckless seconds, into a dunk at the other end, or to get his jump shot off over two defenders when everyone in the arena knows it's coming. This skill set makes him unorthodox as a point guard, to say the least. The Thunder's horrific start as a franchise in 2008 — that legendary 3-29 — was in part a result of Westbrook's wildness. He led the league in turnovers for his first season. Early on, there were murmurs that Westbrook couldn't play point guard, especially next to a scoring superstar like Durant — someone who, many thought, would have benefited more from a Scott Brooks type, a teammate who would get him the ball and get out of the way. Even as the Thunder improved, there were rumors that Westbrook and Durant resented each other, that they couldn't coexist, that the ecosystem of the team might be beyond repair.
Throughout the losing and the turnovers and the rumors, however, Brooks not only kept playing Westbrook but also encouraged his recklessness. That confidence paid off. Westbrook is now a superstar in his own right — if Durant is the second-best player in the world, Westbrook is probably in the Top 10. He's still wild, and he still occasionally makes high-profile mistakes, and TV analysts still love to question his shot selection — but he has improved in all of those areas enough that his net effect on the team is overwhelmingly positive. It's impossible, at this point, to disentangle the bad from the good. In Game 4 of the Finals, Westbrook kept taking wild, flying, contested midrange jumpers — one of the least efficient shots in the sport — and making nearly all of them. He scored 43 points and almost single-handedly kept the Thunder in the game. (They ended up losing, after some LeBron heroics, by 6.)
I asked Brooks if he ever had trouble maintaining a balance between chaos and order, crazy Westbrook and sane Westbrook.
He laughed. "Trust me, there are times where my hair is almost out," he said.
But he defended his point guard. "Is he a natural John Stockton type? No, but he never will be. Those guys are done. Those guys are over. You're not seeing those guys coming back. Russell is a dynamic offensive player. I would be a foolish coach if I said, 'Russell, I don't want you to go to the basket and draw fouls and score and put pressure on the defense.' We need that."
He also dismissed the idea of a rift between Westbrook and Durant.
"I'm with them every day. Did they have some competitive moments? Absolutely. But that's how we work here. We challenge each other. It gets chippy. James and Kevin, Serge and Russell, me and Perk, Thabo and Russell — all of us. If it ever gets on the wrong side of being competitive, I'll step in. But not once have I had to step in, in five years. If Russell and Kevin have problems, then I didn't get along with any of my teammates."
One symptom of a small sports market is a lack of celebrity fans. Among N.B.A. teams, the Lakers are famous for their fame: they have Jack and Penny and Denzel and a whole human gallery of plastic-surgery glamour; the Knicks have Spike and Woody and Chris Rock and a rotating roster of Broadway stars. The Thunder has Wayne Coyne, the singer of the alternative-rock band the Flaming Lips. Coyne is famous for floating over crowds in a giant bubble at concerts and generally behaving like a psychedelic space cadet around town. He was raised in Oklahoma and, unusually — even as his creative peers poured out toward the coasts — he never left. Over the last 15 years, as the Flaming Lips have gained worldwide fame, and as Oklahoma City has begun to rebrand itself as a vital place for young, artsy energy, the city has embraced Coyne, now 51, as a kind of elder statesman. This has turned out to be, for both sides, a rather complicated transaction. Three years ago, the Flaming Lips song "Do You Realize??" was named the official rock song of Oklahoma, but only over the strenuous objections of several state politicians. Coyne's latest OKC adventure, much blogged about in the city, is a spectacularly ill-advised art gallery called the Womb — a drab old warehouse, in the heart of downtown, that he bought and repainted in explosive rainbow colors, complete with cartoonish naked women and a giant abstract vagina on the front door. After Coyne told the local paper that he was going to have a huge New Year's party there, at which teenagers might be able to drop acid with Yoko Ono, the fire marshal showed up and shut the gallery down.
As OKC's reigning celebrity, Coyne sometimes attends Thunder games, where he sits courtside. Although he seems genuinely fond of the team, he's not what you would call a sports aficionado. When I asked him if he followed basketball before the Thunder came to town, he had to think for a few seconds. "No," he said. "I mean, I liked, like, the Harlem Globetrotters. Or some mythical figure like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" — and he pronounced "Jabbar" in the most amazing way, with an exotically soft "j" and several extra vowels, as if it were the name of a genie that had come drifting one morning out of his bong.
Coyne admits that at Thunder games, he doesn't always understand what's going on. "It's not like a Steven Spielberg-scripted event when you're there," he told me. "You're like, Well, did we win? I'm confused. Did they win? And then you look up and you're like, Well, is the game over?"
He said he has been yelled at by other fans for cheering for Kobe Bryant. ("That was wicked! Who is that?" he shouted the first time he saw Kobe score. The crowd told him that it was Kobe and suggested, forcefully, that he stop cheering for him. "But that was wicked!" Coyne responded.)
Coyne and I spoke, late one night, sitting in his Prius, which was parked in front of the Blue Note Lounge, a smoky bar at which the Flaming Lips played their first show 30 years ago. He was wearing a gray suit (he'd just come from a wedding), and his gray hair poured out in a big curly plume from his head. His fingernails were painted gold, and his face was lightly dusted with glitter.
Coyne believes that the Thunder transcend the limits of their confusing sport — that they channel the energy of the whole community in a way that resonates across the world. Using a variety of accents, he told me stories about people in Germany and Switzerland and Sweden — places where he never used to hear about his hometown — all of a sudden talking to him about how much they love the Thunder. "I think people like the idea that, whether you're a weirdo rock dude or a basketball player, we all have this spirit of the city," he said. "Which I don't think really exists. But I think the Thunder has probably pulled it together more than anything else."
Thunder crowds are notoriously loud and supportive. Visiting players often say it feels more like a college crowd than an N.B.A. crowd. Fans wear color-coordinated shirts for big games, and even when the team was horrible, they never booed. "Sometimes I would think to myself, Do these people realize that we're down 20 with 3 minutes to go?" Scott Brooks told me, remembering the early days. "We'd be walking through the tunnel and I'd think: O.K., this is the night that I get heckled. This is the night I get popcorn thrown on me. Nothing. Every single game, it was: 'Hang in there coach. Players, we love you guys.' "
Coyne sees an analogy between basketball games and rock concerts. Playing a song for the thousandth time, he told me, is just as meaningless as putting a ball through a hoop. Under the right circumstances, however, those things take on great collective meaning. "It's that idea of everybody being focused on the same thing at the same time and being together in the bigger experience," he said. "It's silliness, but all things are like that."
The Thunder has become a surprisingly integral part of hipster life in OKC. Coyne lives in a residential neighborhood called the Plaza District, the main drag of which has been — like so much of the city — radically transformed over the last five years. These days there's a vintage shop, a tattoo parlor where people come to get Thunder tattoos and, in a building that used to be known as a brothel, a new restaurant devoted to gourmet grilled-cheese sandwiches. I went into an artsy shop called DNA Galleries, across from the grilled-cheese-sandwich restaurant, and it turned out to be full of Thunder gear: local artists had designed, often very cleverly, their own T-shirts, beer cozies, stickers and onesies. Most businesses around town let their employees dress in Thunder gear on game days, which has created a big market for Thunder clothes: many Oklahomans have entirely separate game-day wardrobes. The store's owner told me that the Thunder changed her life. Saleswise, she said, basketball season is like eight months of Christmas.
And now it is time to talk about James Harden's beard.
The fate of Harden was the first serious test of the Thunder's utopian culture — the first stubborn wrinkle in Sam Presti's enlightened basketball collective.
Harden was the first draft pick ever made by the Thunder: they chose him third in 2009. (Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka all joined when the team was still the Seattle SuperSonics.) His beard, at the time, was modest and closely cropped, the kind of thing you could wear to a business meeting without raising any eyebrows. Harden was a 19-year-old shooting guard with an old man's game, full of the kinds of tricks you might see at your local Y.M.C.A.: quick shots, misdirections, shifts in speed, counterintuitive arm motions designed to bait defenders into fouls. He wasn't overwhelmingly athletic, though, and many experts thought the Thunder had selected him too high. During his rookie year, he did little to convince anyone otherwise. As Harden's beard grew, however, so did his mojo. As it started to hang from his face, his tricks started, improbably, to work in the N.B.A. The beard grew thicker and more unruly, and Harden began to exceed everyone's expectations. By last season, he had become one of the most effective scorers the N.B.A. has ever seen.
By the time the Thunder reached the finals, Harden's beard was a full-on Rip Van Winkle, and it had become something of an unofficial team mascot. Photos flew around the Internet: a James Harden cake from an OKC bakery, with a huge mess of black icing extending off its cake chin; an Oklahoma City building with a giant beard hanging from its facade; a James Harden tattoo on some anonymous superfan's arm. The most popular item at the official Thunder retail store, its manager told me, was a Harden-style fake black beard, which fans would wear at home games. Harden's beard was gratuitous, quirky and improbable — the same set of attributes that made Oklahoma City basketball different than Miami or Los Angeles or New York.
Harden's rise was great for the Thunder — not many third bananas get that good, that fast — but it was also a threat. He had always been a complicated figure in Presti's scheme. He was an elite scorer willing to come off the bench — a citizen willing to pay a serious tax (in minutes, shots and star potential) to be a part of the Thunder society. The group, in turn, offered Harden some harder-to-measure benefits: As a sixth man, he got to play against the other team's bench players, which made him look even better than he was. When he shared the floor with Durant and Westbrook, he benefited from the other team's obsessive attention to them.
But Harden got a little too good. The cost-benefit balance tipped out of whack. He wanted a maximum contract and, by league standards, probably deserved one. The Thunder — having already committed max contracts to Durant and Westbrook, and having just signed Ibaka to a near-max — wanted to pay him less. Near the climactic point of the Harden contract crisis, several people in Oklahoma City joked to me that they would be perfectly willing to pass another Maps tax to help pay for him to stay. Then they made it clear that, actually, they weren't joking; the people of Oklahoma City would seriously do this. One city official I spoke with thought a penny tax would be too much — maybe an eighth, he suggested, with a quarter of that going to improve the city.
Presti's goal is to build a sustainably excellent organization, which means one that transcends its players. No individual, no matter how important or loved, can ever be allowed to trump the group. At 8:28 on the night of Oct. 27, Kevin Durant tweeted the word "Wow." Over the next few hours, that message was retweeted more than 10,000 times. The Thunder had traded James Harden, just three days before the start of the season.
For the Thunder, this trade marked a passage from innocence (youth, ideals, plenitude) to experience (age, cash, loss). The fairy-tale part of their story, in which they're magically immune from the muddiness of N.B.A. success, is over. The team will still be good — Presti got a reasonable return for Harden, and of course they still have Westbrook and Durant — but it feels as if they'll never be the same. Unless, of course, all that collective energy is strong enough to somehow conjure, like a phoenix rising from Harden's beard, another great individual.


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FONTANA, Ca. -- It was April 9, 2005 when I met the young person who impressed me so much I'd talk about him for 7 years. I was moderating a panel discussion of bloggers at Stanford University on "eDemocracy: The Role of blogs and Online Activists in 2004" The young person: 19-year-old Aaron Swartz.
I've often told people how I was blown away by Swartz's eloquence, passion, political ideas and ideas even though I didn't totally agree with him. Clearly, he was a genius, he was charismatic, he was full of joy, he was brimming with determination about the future -- and he was the wave of the future.
And now, at 26, he's dead.
He hung himself.
I got the news Saturday January 12. By now Swartz's story is well known: a computer prodigy at 14 whose intellect created some of what computer users take for granted and an Internet activist, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison and possibly a million dollars in fines for illegally downloading academic papers so people could read them for free.
None of the figures convicted in the Watergate scandal even faced that sentence.
This cyberspace Robin Hood ran smack into an uncaring "system" that wanted to make him a high-profile example for all to see. He suffered from severe depression and had written about it. But, in the end, his life's story, character, depression -- nothing could move inflexible institutions and prosecutors.
Haunting info on Swartz's tragic story is in a Boston Globe report by Kevin Cullen. It notes that Swartz and his attorney "had offered to accept a deferred prosecution or probation, so that if Swartz pulled a stunt like that again, he would end up in prison." The subscription service JSTOR said OK, but MIT nixed it. According to the Globe, prosecutors said no, insisting he plead guilty to all 35 felonies and serve 6 months. The Wall Street Journal says it could have been up to 7 years.
But the most damning quote for any of us who believe in helping young promising people thrive and in using BALANCE when administering justice if they cross the legal line is this quote from the Globe: "'The thing that galls me is that I told [one of the prosecutors] the kid was a suicide risk,' [Swartz's first lawyer] told me. 'His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to [him]. He said, 'Fine, we'll lock him up.' I'm not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I'm saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.'"
You don't have to have been a fly on the wall to imagine someone in the prosecutor's office respond to Swartz's plea bargain offer with the phrase: "He made his bed, now he can sleep in it."
Now Swartz sleeps a deep sleep.
And I wonder: can those at MIT, the Massachusetts prosecutor's office and the Justice Department whose decisions helped lead to this chain of events sleep at night?
Sadly, I conclude -- after the inevitable sigh-I-feel-so-bad or the predictable cover-my-you-know-what comments -- the answer is: they'll move on to focus solely on to their next case.
To those who knew him or knew about him, Swartz was a youthful, quintessentially idealistic, free-spirit intellect who had already changed the Internet, had a lot more he could do -- and wouldn't hurt a fly.
But to others who'd never admit it but saw him as a way to get a notch on their legal belts, make a tough statement to send a message, or get a successfully prosecuted prominent name on a resume for future political office, Swartz is now (their) collateral damage.
Joe Gandelman is a veteran journalist who wrote for newspapers overseas and in the United States. He has appeared on cable news show political panels and is Editor-in-Chief of The Moderate Voice, an Internet hub for independents, centrists and moderates. CNN's John Avlon named him as one of the top 25 Centrists Columnists and Commentators. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com
FONTANA, Ca. -- It was April 9, 2005 when I met the young person who impressed me so much I'd talk about him for 7 years. I was moderating a panel discussion of bloggers at Stanford University on "eDemocracy: The Role of blogs and Online Activists in 2004" The young person: 19-year-old Aaron Swartz.

subset: commoncrawl


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As party supporters munched on cheeseburgers and other barbecue food Wednesday, the five Democrats vying for the nomination in the 5th Congressional District made their cases, saying they will bring progressive values to Washington, D.C.
As party supporters munched on cheeseburgers and other barbecue food Wednesday, the five Democrats vying for the nomination in the 5th Congressional District made their cases, saying they will bring progressive values to Washington, D.C.
"We all are progressive Democrats. We all will fight for (a) woman's right to choose," said state Sen. Karen Spilka, D-Ashland. "We'll all fight for equal pay, we'll all fight for the environment. … We'll fight for gun safety."
Spilka, state Sen. Katherine Clark, D-Melrose, Middlesex Sheriff Peter Koutoujian, state Sen. William Brownsberger, D-Belmont, and state Rep. Carl Sciortino, D-Medford, are each vying to for the nomination in a district that stretches from Boston Harbor to MetroWest. They spoke Wednesday at the Natick Democratic Town Committee's annual cookout.
The Democratic and Republican primaries are Oct. 15. The general election is Dec. 10.
Spilka said track records set the candidates apart. She highlighted her willingness to battle for preventing tolls from rising in MetroWest and boosting transportation and economic development efforts.
She also discussed the role her family – including her sister who has Down syndrome and Alzheimer's disease and her father who had a mental illness – played in shaping her beliefs and teaching her compassion, diplomacy and tenacity.
Sciortino, who became involved in politics advocating for gay rights, mentioned his work on a buffer zone bill to protect women's access to abortion centers
"I'm not afraid to take on the tough fights, the controversial issues, the things people say are not worth taking on," Sciortino said.
Sciortino said he has worked hard to raise the minimum wage and close corporate tax loopholes. He said he will continue to fight for issues important to families and small businesses in Congress.
Brownsberger said he became involved in politics "from the ground up" as a parent worried about traffic safety and the quality of schools.
He said key issues are climate change, the economy and ending poverty. Criminal justice and immigration reform need to be part of how poverty is addressed, he said.
"If I am your congressman, you will know who your congressman is," he said. "You will hear from me a lot."
Koutoujian said he came from an immigrant family, including grandparents who escaped the Armenian genocide with only the clothes on their backs.
Koutoujian said he has worked on protecting the rights of women who are victims of sexual assault and instituting a workplace smoking ban. Issues such as women's rights and moving off fossil fuels need to be a focus in Washington, he said.
"We need to take some of our work as Democrats and bring a strong, progressive voice into Washington, D.C.," he said.
Clark said voters need to send someone to Congress who will improve health care, Social Security and education and infrastructure investment and fight to end gun violence, issues on which extremists in Washington are not focused.
"The issues that you and I talk about around our kitchen tables need to be the issues on the table in Congress," she said.
Clark said she can relate to many of these topics since she has three sons in public school and helps her parents navigate a complicated health care system.
Democratic gubernatorial candidates Don Berwick, Steve Grossman and Joe Avellone talked about subjects such as the economy and fighting poverty.
Erica Ball, who hosted the cookout with her husband, Jay, urged Democrats to remain energized despite the plethora of recent elections.
"We can do it again and again and again," Ball said. "I know you're tired. ….(but) the next one's coming up in October and we've got to be there."
The district includes the MetroWest communities of Ashland, Framingham, Holliston, Natick, Sherborn, Waltham, Wayland, Weston and Southborough.
Brian Benson can be reached at 508-626-3964 or email@example.com.


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Kanto Living Yu4 2-Way Powered Bookshelf Speakers Pair - Pure
Play Audio From Nearly Any Device With The Pair Of Pure Kanto Living Yu4 2-Way Powered Bookshelf Speakers. They Feature An Rca, 1/8 Mini, And Two Optical Toslink Inputs, Plus Built-In Bluetooth For Wireless Connectivity. The Rca Input Can Function As Either A Line-Level Or Phono Input Via A Rear-Mounted Switch, And A Ground Terminal Is Onboard To Attach To Your Turntable. A 5V Usb Port Is Also Built-In To Keep Your Phone Charged During Playback. Each Speaker Has A 4 Kevlar Woofer And A 1 Silk Dome Tweeter To Produce A Total Rms Output Of Up To 70W. An Ir Remote Is Included, Along With Speaker Wire And An 1/8 Aux Cable For Instant Connectivity.
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2779 Volunteer Dr Suite 21
2779 Volunteer Dr Suite 21
Galesburg, IL 61401


text: Sean Ryan resides in the City of Buffalo with his wife Catherine Creighton and their two daughters. Sean is a graduate of SUNY College at Fredonia and Brooklyn Law School, and is admitted to practice law in New York State. Sean's broad legal experience includes work for Neighborhood Legal Services, private law practice collaboration with the Learning Disabilities Association of WNY, concentrating on the rights of disabled students, and the Legal Aide Bureau of Buffalo. His legal career highlights include a record award for a victim of housing discrimination, a successful challenge to a school district's denial of special education services to children enrolled in parochial schools, and an action to compel enforcement of Buffalo's Living Wage Ordinance. In 2008, Sean began working with People United for Sustainable Housing, Inc. to create a non-profit development entity called the Buffalo Neighborhood Stabilization Company, Inc. (BNSC). Sean served as the Executive Director and General Counsel of BNSC and worked to create a redevelopment plan for a section of the West Side of Buffalo. BNSC secured in excess of $3 million in funding for construction projects to turn vacant houses into affordable housing. Sean also created a land bank program to purchase and reuse vacant lots. The evidence of this work is visible throughout the Massachusetts Avenue Corridor. Sean secured a grant, "Gateway to Grant Street", which provides $500,000 in funding to business owners along Grant Street. Sean has served on the Board of Directors and has provided legal representation and guidance to numerous non-profit organizations including Buffalo Niagara River Keeper, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Autistic Services Inc, Coalition for Economic Justice, and the City of Buffalo's Living Wage Commission.


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The Canada Japan Society (CJS) is proud to start off their seventh season of Movie Nights at the National Film Board with director Yoshihiro Nakamura's Fish Story. Fish Story was the winner of the Reel Asian Audience Choice Award Winner in 2009.
Fish Story will be screened on Friday, September 16th, 2011 at National Film Board Theatre 150 John Street (at Richmond).CJS Members – $5 , Non-Members $10.
A review about Fish Story can be read at http://jfilmpowwow.blogspot.com/2009/11/review-fish-story.html.
For more information about the CJS screening visit http://canadajapansociety.blogspot.com/2011_09_04_archive.html.


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Hello & Welcome to the luxury lifestyle.This is the luxury directory where you will find the best the world has to offer. Enjoy. Sia
Living a luxury lifestyle means enjoying the best the world has to offer.
When you travel you get to choose between flying in first class or taking a private plane.
Whether traveling for business or for pleasure the best five star hotels are on offer.
are always the best money can buy from a Ferrari to a Lamborghini for those with exotic tastes or the latest model BMW's or Mercedes Benz for those with more classic tastes.
Keeping up with the latest is always important. Find out what the best news services are to keep you ahead of everyone else.
Private clubs are also a wonderful respite from the hussle and bussle of life.
Fine dining is a must. There are many restaurants with the world's greatest chefs creating amazing meals. Find out where they are and spoil yourself.
A beautiful luxury dream home to relax in is a wonderful reward for all the long hours and hard work. Success is not for the faint hearted that is why the best home available is what you should have. Find the best real estate agents here.
Once you educate yourself about the best it's time to shop from the best. This includes fashion, skin care and gifts.
A luxury lifestyle is one that is all encompassing in all areas of life, from the material to the immaterial.
Having relationships are important especially when celebrating success. Sharing life with loved ones makes life worth living.
Personal Development is also very important. Working on your spiritual side to be your best and helping others do the same is another of life's great rewards. This includes charity work.
When you finally get a chance to relax you might like to take to the sea in a glorious yacht.
Then all you have to do is sail off into the sunset knowing you have worked hard and now you can enjoy what you have earned, living a luxury lifestyle. The best life has to offer.


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Today, we are excited to announce Building a Career Around Photoshop, a live online workshop that will help you take your Photoshop knowledge and skill to the next level.
Attendees can join in each week, download video recordings of each session, take part in homework exercises, and interact with other attendees, live and from the comfort of your own home. During these workshops we will be covering photo editing and retouching, graphic and web design, user interface design, digital art, and much more.
Each weekly session lasts two hours, giving you the chance to receive live training from one of our post popular and talented authors — Martin Perhiniak. It is an amazing investment in your future career, and we think you are going to love everything we have planned!
Envato Tuts+ tutorials are translated into other languages by our community members—you can be involved too!Translate this post


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The Modern Coin era began in America in 1965, the first year the U.S. Mint produced copper-nickel "clad" coins as a replacement for silver coins, ending an unbroken, 173-year tradition. For many collectors, this was the death knell for collecting, as the coins would no longer have any intrinsic value and mintages would be huge. Collectors perceived the modern coinage as a vast desert of ultra-common, mundane, unattractive and boring coins.
A perfect melding of perception and reality occurred with the 50 States Quarters program, in which mass quantities of newly designed quarters flooded the market at the rate of five new designs a year. They are, and will be forever, common.
However, among modern coins there are a great number of unexpected treasures, many of which are extremely valuable, each brought about by a variety of circumstances: some were made in error, some are patterns (prototype issues), others are simply low-mintage items, and others are rare varieties.
Instead of being a wasteland, the field of modern coins is just as exciting and challenging as pre-1965 coins. Certainly, there are many common coins, but there are also plenty of rare items. The following list is a presentation of the Top 100 Modern U.S. Coins as chosen by the PCGS modern coin research team in consultation with noted numismatic experts. The coins are ranked in order of importance, though this order was/is subject to great debate, especially among the Top 10. Ownership has a lot to do with it; availability and/or collectibility has even more. We didn't always agree, but we had a lot of fun selecting our Top 100 Modern Coins, and particularly the Top 10.
Perhaps the biggest argument was over the #1 coin, the 1964-D Peace Dollar. "How can the #1 Modern U.S. coin be one that is illegal to own?" several experts asked. "It was made before 1965," others remarked. However, the general consensus was that the 1964-D Peace Dollar was too important to exclude and if one ever came onto the market (and the government permitted its sale), it would become one of the most valuable of all U.S. coins.
Arguments aside, collectors will find numerous surprises and lots to get excited about in this compilation. Most of the coins are highly collectible and within the reach of many collectors. Value collectors will appreciate the low cost of the numerous low-mintage coins in this listing. If these were "classic" pre-1965 coins, their value would be considerably higher, often by magnitudes, because of their scarcity.
Most of all, this is an enjoyable assortment of coins, offering diversity in design, challenge in hunting them down, and a lifetime of collecting fun. Even better, the Modern Coin era continues, and who knows what exciting coins tomorrow will bring!


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Okla. Treasurer Says Fiscal Cliff May Harm Economy (Dec 05, 2012)
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - Oklahoma's treasurer says the fiscal cliff's combination of tax hikes and reduced government spending could harm the state's economy.
Congressional negotiators are working with President Barack Obama to avoid steep tax hikes and spending cuts set to go into effect at the beginning of 2013. And Treasurer Ken Miller said Tuesday failure to avoid the fiscal cliff would mean a tax increase for Oklahomans and likely spending cuts at military bases and other government facilities in the state.
Miller says leaders in Washington need to start working together to avoid damage to the state's fragile economy.
Meanwhile, Miller says state revenue collections dipped slightly in November primarily because of reduced gross production payments on oil and natural gas.
But he says consumer confidence remains high and sales tax receipts rose.
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A Ticket to Ride: A Novel (Paperback)
In the long, hot Illinois summer of 1973, insecure, motherless Jamie falls under the dangerous spell of her older, more worldly cousin Fawn, who's come to stay with Jamie and her uncle as penance for committing an "unmentionable act."
It is a time of awakenings and corruptions, of tragedy and loss, as Jamie slowly discovers the extent to which Fawn will use anything and anyone to further her own ends—and recognizes, perhaps too late, her own complicity in the disaster that takes shape around them.
"A captivating story about a teenager's struggle to be accepted by her peers. . . . The story is more than believable—it simply comes alive. The book perfectly captures the free-spirited attitude of the decade and the curiosity of adolescence."—Tampa Tribune
"McLain compels as she excavates two tragedies." —Chicago Sun-Times
About the Author
Paula McLain received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, and has been a resident of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She is the author of two collections of poetry, two novels, and a memoir, and lives in Cleveland with her family.
Praise For…
"Paula McLain has put a poet's ear to the urgency of adolescence...a strong throb of a first novel."
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
"…poet and memoirist McLain compels as she excavates two tragedies."
— Chicago Sun-Times
"[McLain's] writing is gorgeous, and Jamie and Fawn are heartbreakingly real."
— Katrina Kittle, author of The Kindness of Strangers
"Filled with mystery and longing, McLain lays bare the raw emotion that guides us all..."
— Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle
"...a haunting coming-of-age story...sun-dazzled prose that hides a cold, foreboding underbelly...gorgeous writing."
— Gillian Flynn, author of Sharp Objects
"...a vivid portrait of the summer of '73...the relationships it expores are timeless...a genuine literary accomplishment."
— Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me
"...[A] beautifully written book...deeply felt and engrossing--an immense pleasure to read."
— Leah Stewart, author of The Myth of You and Me
"Assured and ambitious... the complicated bonds of a makeshift family... lyrical precision. A deft and haunting book."
— Katharine Noel, author of Halfway House
"Absorbing, tantalizing, and super-heated as an endless summer day."
— Michelle Wildgen, author of You're Not You


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Katahada Damahoocha
I sometimes hear it said that our comics are nonsensical forays without the post, which is a charge I really don't care about. It's not true most of the time. If it were, the comic would look something like this.
Believing that everything is going to hell and the good times will never be back is very easy to do, and honestly you could make pretty good case for that with the available evidence. As it pertains to games specifically, it's not uncommon to hear speeches at Internet street corners of the "end times" variety, lamentations that something dark has taken root in the formerly pure core of game development and we must endure a century of despair. Tyrants have seized power. Just as in an old fable, it is usually around this time that the hero is revealed.
Katamari Damacy is, in no uncertain terms, the finest 20 dollars I have ever spent on a new game.
Tell me if you've heard this one: As the tiny Prince of the Cosmos, you must roll a sticky ball around on the Earth, progressively picking up larger and larger things until your huge ball of garbage is transformed into a star.
I don't remember where I saw it, it was either at Insert Credit or The Magicbox. These days I see it in my dreams, as cats, children, and sumos drawn are into my vortex - grist for my inexorable march. The level usually determines your starting size, which itself determines the sorts of things you can pick up immediately - but the entire level scales to take the size of your garbage ball into account. For example, I started the level in a public park which had a gigantic clock face in the middle, and by the time I rolled my ball back there the clock was so small I barely recognized it. You start by rolling over toys, fruit, coins, and cookies and in no time you're grabbing golf balls and cassette tapes, moving up to cats and small chunks of garden fence, eventually knocking little girls off their bikes, and snaring both. You might start by rolling over tiny eggs in the carton, slowly graduating to larger eggs which hatch and cheep as you acquire them, moving on to sparrows and roosters. I don't know either, man.
The multiplayer isn't bad either, though it's hardly the star of the show. I'm basically mentioning it because if you have acquired more stuff than your opponent, the game doesn't differentiate them from any of the other fluff and stuff that is lying around - you just pick them up like anything else while they wiggle the sticks and try to escape. That's pretty demoralizing.
There is a extremely surreal hook for the whole thing, a strange storyline being told in cutscenes as well as reams of truly insane dialogue from The King of the Cosmos - highly odd turns of phrase that genuinely appear to be the product of an alien intellect. In addition, the game is a repository of exquisite music - I've imported music for more than 20 dollars from that expensive island, and none of those had the decency to include a game. It's getting harder to find, from what I hear. I can understand why that might be the case.
!label (CW)TB
i'm just trying to unwind


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A Hot Dog Race to Remember
Hey everyone! Dave here. Well, if you attended Thursday night's game, you witnessed one of the more epic hot dog races this wonderful ballpark has ever seen.
We had Kevin (mustard), Sam (ketchup) and I (hot dog) race from the first base warning track to the third base warning track. However, this was far from your more traditional hot dog race. Here's the pic-by-pic recap and how it all went down (all photos courtesy of Allison Rhoades):
Getting all limbered up before the big race
AND WE'RE OFF! I waste no time taking mustard down…he had no idea what was coming.
We wrestle around a little bit, and now it's on with no looking back.
At this point, I can't forget to actually win the race. Ketchup has taken a commanding lead and I have to try and catch up (see what I did there — ketchup, catch up…oh well, moving on).
Mustard then did an excellent job of not letting me off so easily and taking me down so he can get up. I can't speak for mustard, but at this point my head is spinning and I'm feeling a bit disoriented.
Mustard got one last quick shove while I'm trying to regain my bearings. At this
point I'm thinking ketchup has cruised to an easy victory.
While mustard sees ketchup in his sights I'm fighting the dizziness and trying to
get to my feet.
I stumble around like a lunatic as the hot dog hoodie falls over my eyes and I can't see anything. I guess I had it coming, but I had to shake it off and get back in the race. As they say, if you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
And look at mustard think he can get to ketchup and beat him. He's smiling as I'm far behind in third place. Oh he has no idea what was coming up next…
BAM! Ketchup was hanging out behind home plate to slow mustard down. I come sprinting in from behind and take him down once more. Mustard was the heavy favorite to win, so we had to make sure he never had too much momentum going.
As ketchup once again takes the lead, mustard is still in shock after I speared him. Notice anything unusual here? Well, it appears there is a pickle waiting in the Redbirds dugout. What more could we possibly have in store?
As mustard runs by the dugout HERE COMES THE PICKLE! Out of nowhere mustard gets blind-sided once again, except this time it was the pickle's turn.
It was a clean take-down as I just barely scampered out of the way. The pickle was played by Shane (NOTE: It isn't easy moving around in that pickle costume, so major props to Shane for not only willingly participating, but to perfectly executing the tackle. If Memphis ever has a pro football team here, Shane would love to be their middle linebacker, but only if he gets to wear the pickle costume).
Despite the lack of photographic evidence, I somersaulted across the finish the line as the pickle was apparently not satisfied with just taking mustard down. He scampered across the finish line just in front of one of the diving condiments.
We quickly scurried off the field (after all, there is still a baseball game to be played) as I apparently leave ketchup hanging.
Thank you Kevin for being a good sport about this whole thing. He had no idea what was planned, but after all…what goes around comes around. So make sure you keep an eye out for the next time the not-so-conventional hot dog race trio makes their next appearance.
Oh yea…and the pickle.


text:
American Energy Group sells shares to private investors: Business briefs
Perrier introduces new ad campaign for Secret Place
Perrier Sparkling Natural Mineral Water announced the launch of Secret Place (www.perriersecretplace.com) a digital experience that invites customers to participate in a "secret party" in Paris. This digital interactive feature allows users to participate through the eyes of 60 different characters, and offers sweepstakes for a chance to win an invitation to one of five parties at Carnival in Rio, Ibiza in Spain, St. Tropez in France, Art Basel in Miami or New Year's Eve in Sydney, Australia. Created by Ogilvy & Mather to mark Perrier's 150th anniversary, Secret Place combines brand entertainment with gaming and is intended for mature audiences only. The Perrier brand is owned by Nestle Waters.
First County Bank offers
trio of scholarships
The 2013 First County Bank Richard E. Taber Citizenship Award application is now available online. This annual award is available to high school students living in lower Fairfield County and program awards $5,000 scholarships to three deserving students. The foundation will be accepting student applications now through May 31. The recipient must be a high school senior who has been accepted to an accredited two- or four-year college or university. The application is available at http://www.firstcountybank.com/form/richard-e-taber-citizenship-award-application Winners will be notified by June 30.
Naugatuck Valley posts loss
Naugatuck Valley Financial Corp., parent company of Naugatuck Valley Savings and Loan, incurred a net loss for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2012. Due primarily to the size of the operating loss incurred in 2012, the deferred tax asset of $5.4 million that had previously been recognized was offset by a DTA reserve of $5.4 million in the fourth quarter. The corporation had a net loss of $5.7 million or 86 cents per share, compared with net loss of $6 million or 1 cent per share for the same period last year. It had a $15.02 million net loss or $2.31 per share in 2012, compared with net income of $1.6 million in 2011. As of December 2012, it had total assets of $526.40 million compared with $ 572.22 million as of December 2011. Traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "NVSL," it saw its share price fall 16 cents to $7.01 in trading Wednesday. Its 52-week share price has ranged between $6.52 and $7.79.


text:
. . . a dolphin like Pandora will swim up to say hello.
You might see Karen basking in the Florida Keys sun.
When did you last visit Dolphin Research Center? Isn't it time for another trip?
. . . a dolphin like Pandora will swim up to say hello.
Posted by The DRC Family at 3:44 PM 2 comments
We're all excited about the movie Dolphin Tale premiering on September 23rd. The inspiring story of Winter is a tremendous example of how modern medical techniques can be used to save marine mammals. The Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums (AMMPA), of which Dolphin Research Center is an accredited member, has put together a story about some of the other ways that people have used medical technologies to help dolphins, sea lions and other marine mammal friends. We thought you'd enjoy reading it!
Like New 'Dolphin Tale' Movie
This week the movie Dolphin Tale brings to the big screen the true story of Winter, a severely injured dolphin who stranded off the
A West Coast marine park's senior veterinarian partnered with a university medical center's chief of nephrology to do the first successful dialysis on a dolphin. The nephrologist later performed the first endoscopic laser lithotripsy procedure to break up Dottie's kidney stones. (Sea World
People who visit accredited marine parks, aquariums, and zoos are supporting these groundbreaking efforts to help marine mammals while learning about the need to protect marine animals and their ocean environments.
Posted by The DRC Family at 12:12 PM 2 comments
Posted by The DRC Family at 11:22 AM 1 comments
Labels: baby dolphins, Dolphin Tale, Winter
Over 550 people visited Dolphin Research Center on Saturday, September 10th for Family Fun Day. Florida Keys residents were admitted free. Everyone else received 2-for-1 admission. In addition to watching dolphins and sea lions in action and splashing in the Sprayground, guests took part in special activities like an information scavenger hunt, presentations on Who Polluted the Bay and Eat the Reef. Kids enjoyed craft projects to make colorful reef fish or sea turtles from old DVD or CD disks. Home Depot donated clay pots and other supplies that kids could paint and then use to plant their own mangroves.
Everyone had a fantastic time!
Thank you all for coming and enjoying DRC. We and the dolphins sure enjoyed seeing you.
|Using fun food items like marshmallows and graham crackers, kids learn how coral reefs form. (They then ate their reefs.)
Posted by The DRC Family at 12:18 PM 1 comments


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|2012-05-10, 10:43
|Link #181
Dea ex Kakera
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sea of Fragments
Based on the last two characters being labeled differently and the way the other characters have been introduced, I'm guessing that the framing story will be Jeanne Amakawa getting interviewed by Julie Hayashibara for a news piece, and Julie will tell her all about the history of Primavera.
I can't make out a lot of the kanji, but the Japanese introductions in the PV confirm that Jeanne and Julie are both from the 21st century, and Jeanne is the narrator. She also seems to be the head of the Japanese mafia, among other things.
Last edited by LyricalAura; 2012-05-10 at 10:57.
|2012-05-10, 12:15
|Link #183
Spider Lily Translations
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: England
Age: 26
I love the PV makes me really excited about this game.
It's great that Witch Hunt were able to help translate the text.
As for the resolution, as far as I know NScripter supports a maximum resolution of 800x600, so they'd have to use a different engine if they wanted a higher resolution than that.
Yes, ONScripter can scale the game to whatever resolution you want, but it can't re-scale the game while it's running. So if the resolution was 1280x720, the game wouldn't appear correctly on displays with a resolution lower than that (1024x768 is still extremely common). Also, some people like playing in window mode (as opposed to full screen), and a high resolution would make that impractical.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to Rose Guns Days. I hear there might be a trial version? Can't wait to find out more about this game.
|2012-05-13, 13:08
|Link #186
[VN] Higurashi ~ Spanish
The PV has awakened different emotions in me, seriously
Music, atmosphere, and characters ... all wonderful
But, there were some characters that were not shown.
PS: I've made a quick spanish translation of the PV.
|2012-05-16, 16:24
|Link #187
Warned for a moment...
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Virginia
Age: 31
Yeah, the music is really cool. Its both classical and jazzy. I could have swore I was hearing Mozart's 40th Symphony near the beginning of the PV. Most of the characters look unique and interesting... except Philip Butler kind of reminds me of a character from another one of his stories >_>
|2012-05-17, 19:28
|Link #191
阿賀野型3番艦、矢矧 Lv175
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Belgium, Brussels
Age: 34
Since we are talking about that kind of stuff, putting the artists and their respective characters:
Souichirou (Umineko: Episode 4): Rose, Richard, Stella, Meryl, Keireiji, Miguel, Julie
Suzuki Jirou (Higurashi: Tatarigoroshi-hen, Umineko: Episode 2): Leo, Philip, Lee
Ninagawa Yaiko (Monokoke): Wayne, Cyrus, Amanda
Ryukishi07: Claudia, Alfred, Jeanne
Souichirou got the spotlight, and I color me quite pleased with that, especially how this guy managed to design rose that way, and still pull some badass chars like Richard and Keireiji.
And good thing Suzuki only designed guys, because he really has trouble with girls (I swear, Tatarigoroshi really irked me...)
Last edited by Klashikari; 2012-05-17 at 21:19.
|2012-05-19, 08:53
|Link #193
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2009
It's great that R07 thought about fans outside Japan and included a translation in the PV. Thanks both to him and you guys for doing it
I'm also satisfied with the amount of (hot) male cast, happy fangirl is happy.
While going through tumbril I found lots of stuff about Rose Guns Days:
Spoiler for massive character designs with more quotes and info:
And moar images from tumblr (most of them taken from pixiv)
Spoiler for space:
|ryukishi07, spoiler, visual novel
|Thread Tools


text:
Zoot's high-end tank for enhanced sun protection, the women's Performance Tri Tank provides essential support, protection and comfort without sacrificing style. Full front and back coverage, as well as a dropped back hem make this a great tank for the women looking for more coverage from the sun. Premium Performance Endura fabric will keep you dry, comfortable and supported. Side stash pockets for nutrition storage and a built-in bra for added support make this a functional piece for your training and racing season.
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text:
Big Data With Hadoop & Spark Certification Training Bootcamp - Live Instructor-Led Classes | Certification & Project Included | 100% Moneyback Guarantee | Hyderabad, India
Hyderābād, Andhra Pradesh, India
Big Data With Hadoop & Apache Spark Certification Training - Live Instructor-led Online Classes Our Big Data With Hadoop & Spark certification Training Bootcamp with 100% moneyback guarantee is designed to impart knowledge, skills, and hands-on experience required to become top-rated Hadoop and Spark Developer, Architect, Data Engineer, and similar roles. This course is also compatible with the following certifications: Cloudera Certified Professional (CCP): Data Engineer Cloudera Certified Associate (CCA): Spark & Hadoop Developer Hortonworks Certified Developer (HDPCD) Hortonworks Certified Developer (HDPCD): Spark Tools and concepts covered: HDFS, YARN, ZooKeeper, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, NoSQL databases, Sqoop, Flume, Oozie, Scala, Apache Spark, RDD, DataFrames, Spark Streaming, Kafka, MLlib, SparkSQL, SparkR, GraphX and more For more on curriculum, please click here Big Data With Hadoop & Apache Spark Certification Training - Live Instructor-led Online Classes Live online instructor-led classes 90 days access to lab (real-life production cluster with Hadoop and Spark pre-configured) 60+ hours online classes Complimentary access to high-quality videos, assessments and case studies Classes spread over 20+ sessions of 3 hours each Training by industry experts Life-time access to course content Real life projects Earn certificate 24x7 online experts help What To Expect: The Classes: The classes are held online on Saturdays and Sundays for 3 hours each for an overall of 60+ hours, that is, 20+ classes over 10+ weekends. The Mode: We use Google Hangouts or Zoom to enable live, interactive classes that are also recorded for future reference. The Audience: We have a global audience that logs in to work hand in hand with our world-class instructors. Get Certified at No Extra Cost with 100% Moneyback Guarantee Why Is This Training Different: The Instructors: Our instructors are industry experts, people who have been there and done that. They not only encourage questioning but also give solutions that are practical and applicable at an enterprise level. The Practice: We provide an actual cluster for hands-on practicing. It removes the need to install virtual machines and makes learning easier and fun. The Curriculum: Created by industry experts to equip attendees to hit the ground running. CloudxLab sessions along with the curated curriculum make starting a project at work or attending an interview on Big Data a cake walk. The Project: Sentiment analysis of Iron Man 3 movie using Hive and visualizing the sentiment data using BI tools such as Tableau Churning the logs of NASA Kennedy Space Center WWW server to find out useful business and devops metrics. Build real-time analytics dashboard for an e-commerce company using Apache Spark, Kafka, Spark Streaming, Node.js, Socket.IO and Highcharts Real-time sentiment analysis of Twitter tweets using Apache Spark, Kafka, Spark Streaming and Stanford NLP The Preparation: This is the only course in the market that enables course takers to consider any of the following certifications after completion: Cloudera Certified Professional (CCP): Data EngineerCloudera Certified Associate (CCA): Spark & Hadoop DeveloperHortonworks Certified Developer (HDPCD)Hortonworks Certified Developer (HDPCD): Spark ___ CloudxLab CloudxLab is a leader in the domain of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning and related technologies. Providing consulting, training, solutions and products related to above-mentioned technologies Why CloudxLab? Best in Class Trainers handpicked for the courses Anytime Anywhere Classes Class Recordings available for lifetime 24x7 support to customers for any technical query Popular Online interactive platform Certification at No Extra Cost Real Life Projects For any queries, write to us: Kelly Thomas, Business Development manager Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Phone: +1 (412) 568-3901 https://cloudxlab.com


text: Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.


text:
Study Abroad
Legal Globalization & Comparative Law
The Legal Globalization and Comparative Law course introduces students to the phenomenon of globalization and its impact on cultures and legal systems using different countries and topics of examination as case studies. Students learn about a particular country and a specific legal topic. This might include examination of a country's history, legal systems, culture, and languages. Students travel to the country of examination with their instructor, typically for a period of one week, to continue their studies. Activities in the country of destination might include service learning and other experiential learning opportunities, lectures from foreign academics, business leaders, governmental officials, and attorneys, and visits to legal institutions.
Read about recent student experiences.


text:
Post installation, during start up of the program an error occurs. The message:
"An error occured in the program. Error 1000. The license expired on 2009-11-22. Please replace the license file C:\Program Files (x86)\Dataceptor\license.xml with a valid license."
According to the licence.xml this is true and I'm unable to work around it.
Any suggestions?


text:
UPDATE: We will be broadcasting the Membership Meeting portion of the upcoming Spring AAVSO Meeting via GoToWebinar. The details are below.
Award presentations are first on the agenda! We hope that many of you will be able to join us.
Title: AAVSO Membership Meeting, June 12, 2014
Time: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time (02:00 - 04:00 UT June 13 )
Join us for award presentations (first on the agenda!), Association reports, and Q&A.
The latest newsletter of the Society for Astronomical Sciences (SAS) with informantion on their most recent meeting - including a mention of our own Mike Simonsen!
The AAVSO held its 101st Spring Meeting in Big Bear, CA on May 22-24, 2012. This was a joint meeting with the Society of Astronomical Sciences (SAS). (We had a very well attended joint meeting with SAS in 2009 at this same location.) As before, SAS handled the registration and paper submissions for this meeting. Both AAVSO members and SAS members received the member registration rate.


text:
"You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden.. Sweden! Who would believe this?"
he thundered on Saturday.
The problem is that no-one had any idea what he was referring to as no terrorist incident of any type had taken place in Sweden the night before, or indeed in the past year.
Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt took to Twitter to ask:
Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.
US Twitter users solemnly urged people to stand fast and 'Pray for Sweden' just as they had done over the equally fictional US 'Bowling Green Massacre' recently invented by Kellyanne Conway during a TV interview.
Trump clarified Sunday that he was referring to something he had seen on Fox News ― apparently an interview with conservative filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who linked a purported rising crime rate with the thousands of refugees Sweden has welcomed to its country.
Swedish Twitter users had their own response:


text:
Director Steven Soderbergh is currently shooting his next film, Contagion, in Chicago with stars Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet. But from the sound of it, Contagion may be among Soderbergh's last endeavors as a filmmaker. Damon explains:
"After this movie [Soderbergh and I] are doing Liberace next summer with Michael Douglas, and then he might do one more movie after that with George [Clooney], and then after that he's retiring."
More after the jump:
The news is, on the surface, a surprise. At 47, Soderbergh is still young and notably proficient: he has directed thirteen features since 2000, with two more on the way in 2011 (Contagion and Haywire). But in the context of Soderbergh's style, with his fixture on form and technique, it starts to make sense. Damon shared a telling anecdote with 24 Frames, following his work with noted octogonerian Clint Eastwood on Hereafter.
"After I worked with Clint [Eastwood] I went back and said, 'Look, Clint is having a blast and he's going to be 80 years old.' And Steven says back, 'Yeah, but he's a storyteller and I'm not.'"
Soderbergh has always explored the experimental side of film — the story-within-a-story of Full Frontal, the 1940s aesthetic of The Good German, the non-sequitir narration of The Informant! — to engage in production. But the actual process of filming a movie requires infinite repition, so it's understandable why Soderbergh feels restless. Said Damon:
"[Soderbergh] wants to paint and he says he's still young enough to have another career. He's kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He's not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that's it. He says, 'If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I'm going to blow my brains out.' "
The Informant! proved to me that Soderbergh is still as sharp as ever, more than twenty years after the 1989 debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Contagion, Haywire, and Liberace automatically qualify for my most anticipated list of the next couple years. And if Soderbergh does plan to reunite with frequent collaborator George Clooney for this theoretical final film (quite possibly The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), I'm in. I love the idea of a master bowing out at the top of his game. But I will miss his voice in cinema. Damon, who wants to move into directing himself, agrees:
"If you're an actor or a writer or someone working in film, it's such a waste. For me, I'm going to spend the next 40 years trying to become a great director and I will never reach what he's reached. And he's walking away from it."
This isn't the first time we have heard about Soderbergh's planned retirement. Two years ago, the director told Esquire
"I'm 45 now. When I turn 51, that'll be 25 years. And that's a lot of time to do one thing. And it'll be, like, 30 movies. And that's enough. I don't want to have that falloff. I want to go out with Abbey Road."
May The Man from U.N.C.L.E. be Abbey Road.
Haywire hits theaters April 22, 2011. Contagion follows on October 21, 2011.


text:
"Skating with the Spirit," New Era, Nov. 2013, 42
Skating with the Spirit
Eirik Sterri lives in California, USA.
My friends all gave in to smoking, but the little things helped me stay strong.
I started skateboarding in the seventh grade with a group of my friends. Skateboarding was huge at my school in California. Most of the guys and some girls I knew skated on a regular basis.
I was a street skater. I didn't like going to skate parks because of the people there. I was honestly scared of the kinds of people who showed up at the skate parks.
As my friends and I continued on our "skating careers," we became fairly good. We were able to receive sponsorships from local skate shops, which meant we got free skateboards, shirts, pants, etc. It was awesome and a really fun sport to pursue.
But, as with anything else, there were temptations.
As we gained more confidence in our skills, my friends and I started traveling to different skate spots and parks, and we started meeting many new, different kinds of people. Unfortunately, the skaters we met all had one thing in common: smoking. Every skater smoked, it seemed. My freshman year, my friends gave in to the temptation and began smoking. Still, I didn't think much of it, because I'd decided I would never do that.
As time went on, my relationship with my friends grew weaker. We didn't have the same interests anymore. They used drugs or alcohol every weekend. I could see them throwing away their lives. I couldn't believe how bad it had become.
One Saturday morning, one of them asked me, "How did you stay away from it, man? Why can't I be like you? You have something special in your life." It was then that I realized it was because I'd always held myself to the Church standards.
I owe my ability to resist smoking and the other temptations to the little things. Even as my life got very busy with school, family, Church, dating, sports, and friends, I stuck to the plain and simple things. I read my scriptures, said my prayers, went to Mutual, and went to church. I know that if I hadn't given myself the spiritual nourishment I needed every day, then I may have given in to temptation.
I know we must do the little things in the gospel. They will give us the strength we need to stay strong and avoid temptation.


text:
Presidential museum launching exhibit on Benito Juarez, the 'Mexican
Author of
book on the U.S.-Mexican War delivering speech
Send a link to a friend
[December 03, 2012]
SPRINGFIELD -- Everyone knows
the story: Born more than 200 years ago to a poor farm family. Rose
in the world thanks to education and the law. Led his nation through
turmoil and civil war.
A new
exhibit at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum will explore the
two great leaders and their roles in the U.S.-Mexico War of
The exhibit opens Wednesday in conjunction with a presentation by
Amy S. Greenberg on her book "A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and
the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico." Dr. Greenberg will sign books at
6:30 and start her presentation at 7 p.m.
Juarez, a 19th-century reform leader, sought to build a
democratic society similar to that of United States. He also led his
country through a civil war between reformers and the forces of the
status quo. He is often called "the Mexican Lincoln."
"Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juarez both started near the bottom
of society but had the drive and personality to reach the very top.
They also had the leadership skills to guide their nations through
extraordinary turmoil," said Eileen Mackevich, director of the
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. "Both men are
fascinating, and we're thrilled that visitors to the museum will
have this chance to explore the accomplishments of two such
important leaders."
During the U.S.-Mexican War, freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln
denounced the military action in a series of resolutions that became
known as the Spot Resolutions. They earned him the nickname "Spotty
Lincoln" and cost him politically.
On the other side of the border, Benito Juarez was serving as
governor of Oaxaca, Mexico. He was forced into exile after the war,
when Santa Ana established himself as dictator of Mexico. Juarez
moved to New Orleans and worked alongside slaves in a tobacco
[to top of second column]
Juarez returned to Mexico in 1855 to lead La Reforma, an
anti-cleric movement that sought to return land to poor farmers and
curb the power of wealthy conservative officials. Violence flared in
1857 with the beginning of "the Reform War," which lasted until
Juarez served as a de facto president in 1858, was formally
elected as president of Mexico in 1861 and served until his death in
1872. Despite internal political strife and invasion by European
countries, he continued to promote democracy and was determined to
reform a corrupt government. He died in office from a heart attack.
The Juarez Global Wall features battle scenes from the
U.S.-Mexican War, maps of Mexico and reproductions of letters and
political cartoons. It follows a similar exhibit on Mohandas Gandhi
as part of the museum's efforts to showcase great world leaders who
share the values of Abraham Lincoln.
Exhibit materials were drawn from the collection of the Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Library and from institutions such as Tulane
University, the University of New Mexico Center for Southwest
Research, the Yale University Beinecke Library Special Collections,
University of Texas at Arlington and Northern Illinois University.
Two educational groups at the University of Illinois at
Springfield provided assistance: CIELO, the Culturally Integrated
Education for Latinos Organization, and OLAS, the Organization of
Latino American Students.
[Text from file received from the
Illinois Historic Preservation Agency]
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Fighting in Abidjan causes increased displacement amid lack of humanitarian funding
TitleFighting in Abidjan causes increased displacement amid lack of humanitarian funding
ERC Amos expressed today serious concern about the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Côte d'Ivoire. Since the announcement of election results in early December, the humanitarian situation has worsened dramatically in the country, with a particularly sharp deterioration in the last month.
"The escalation of violence and use of heavy weaponry, particularly in urban areas, is taking an increasing toll on civilians," Ms. Amos said. "I am also concerned about the increasing targeting and harassment of immigrants from other parts of West Africa, thousands of whom are fleeing the country," she added.
Armed fighting, killings and other human rights violations have become daily occurrences in Côte d'Ivoire's economic capital, Abidjan. On 17 March 2011, pro-Gbagbo elements shelled a neighbourhood in Abobo, killing up to 30 people and injuring at least 40 more.
"The incident demonstrates a blatant disregard for international humanitarian law which prohibits attacks against civilians," said USG Amos in a statement on 18 March 2011. "I am particularly worried by reports that civilians who wish to flee the violence in Abobo are prevented from doing so while others who are able to access assistance are intimidated into refusing it."
Humanitarian Coordinator Ndolamb Ngokwey has expressed concern over the worsening situation, and the lack of funding for humanitarian response. The Côte d'Ivoire emergency appeal was launched in January for $55 million, but only $6.9 million has been received. The Liberia appeal is facing a shortage of $7 million. UNICEF is appealing for $51 million to finance its activities in Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia.
"We have just allocated $10.4 million from the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund—and we must to be able to use it to provide desperately needed aid," she added.
The situation is expected to worsen as 700,000 people – half the population of the Abobo neighbourhood – could be displaced in Abidjan following the deteriorating security and human rights situation, according to UNHCR. Aid organizations estimate that those displaced by violence in Abidjan will live with host families, making IDPs harder for humanitarian organizations to locate.